Daryl Hannah has started the kind of blog we'd all love to run - weekly 5 minute videos with cute soundtracks and material ranging from the incredibly relevant to the heartbreaking. It's basically her and her editor and whomever else she can coax into helping. (This would be an area where being a leggy blond would seem advantageous, but in my experience being a short brunette works too if yr cause is pure.) Her fourth video (she's got eight plus an emergency episode trying to save an organic farm in Los Angeles - almost improbable that such a thing existed to begin with - hopeful, no, chilluns?) is a rough but encouraging piece about green architecture.
Episode 4 covers converting a California house to be green and sustainable, including FSC-certified wood, a cork floor, a bathroom floor of 100% recycled glass tile and the shower stalls with river pebbles, and a low-flow cistern. Another house in West LA was equipped with solar panels to the point where the energy meter was going backward, and a kitchen hot water hooked to a foot pedal to keep the water consumption down. The third house she visits is a fully modular solar-powered home in Venice Beach, with huge gorgeous windows and an elegant open plan (well, it's modular - you want walls, move them to where you want them!). For further information she recommends greenhomebuilding.com, hempbuilding.com or mdesigns.net for affordable green pre-fabs. (Fire up the browser, true love, we're going house-hunting.) [GT]
From: BEST OF 2008: Eco-friendy and sustainable shoes